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Last week I joined Blake Morris for a walk in Abney Park cemetery. At the moment, Blake is systematically going through the walks in Ways to Wander edited by Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind. This week’s walk was Abney Park Cemetery, as written up by Romany Reagan. I asked to join Blake as I want…

Julian Vayne, an occultist, held a workshop on psychogeography at Treadwells yesterday As Witold von Ratingen says in his history of psychogeography, Loitering with Intent, British psychogeography has divided into three groups: – the ‘materialists’, based on the Situationists and largely concerned with using psychogeography as a tool to influence the political or economic spheres:…

An intriguing article by Serensinhe at al reports an experiment in ‘using deep learning to quantify the beauty of outdoor places’. This struck a chord, because of Kant’s assertion that aesthetic judgements are a philosophical hybrid. When I like a view, my aesthetic judgement is purely subjective (there is no ‘objective’ reason for it) –…

For some reason, I have spent the last couple of weeks studying Petrarch. Petrarch was of course one of the first humanists. He was one of the first of them to seek out old manuscripts of Greek and Latin authors, to translate them. and to prepare improved editions by comparing multiple sources. Trying to find…

The AISB held a conference on Serendipity at Strawberry Hill House in May. (Owing to pressure of work with The Portrait Machine, I have only just got round to blogging this.) Horace Walpole, who built the house and filled it with art objects, also introduced the term serendipity into the language. I went largely to…

I heard a good talk yesterday on a project to digitise and display National Archives data on trademarked designs. The effect was rather spoilt by the presenter showing a congratulatory email he had received. How can one overstate the collapse of carpet-weaving in Kidderminster? and, more seriously, does it matter? Looking at other projects by…